An attempt to protect the endangered right whale from being killed by commercial ships has languished for more than a year in part because Vice President Dick Cheney’s office and White House economists questioned the conclusions of marine scientists, according to internal documents.
The documents were released Wednesday by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who questioned why White House officials had raised "baseless objections" to findings by government scientists who for years had been studying the dangers posed to the whale by commercial shipping. "The North Atlantic right whale is one of the most critical endangered species on Earth," Waxman wrote the White House Office of Management and Budget, demanding to know why the final regulation to increase protection for the whale from commercial vessels was being held up.
Only about 300 to 350 of the whales, which are protected under the Endangered Species Act, remain in Atlantic waters off the eastern seaboard. At least 19 of the whales have been confirmed killed since 1986 and marine conservationists believe other fatal collisions likely were never reported…
Leaving No Tracks
June 27, 2007Sue Ellen Wooldridge, the 19th-ranking Interior Department official, arrived at her desk in Room 6140 a few months after Inauguration Day 2001. A phone message awaited her. "This is Dick Cheney," said the man on her voice mail, Wooldridge recalled in an interview. "I understand you are the person handling this Klamath situation. Please call me at — hmm, I guess I don’t know my own number. I’m over at the White House."
Wooldridge wrote off the message as a prank. It was not. Cheney had reached far down the chain of command, on so unexpected a point of vice presidential concern, because he had spotted a political threat arriving on Wooldridge’s desk.
In Oregon, a battleground state that the Bush-Cheney ticket had lost by less than half of 1 percent, drought-stricken farmers and ranchers were about to be cut off from the irrigation water that kept their cropland and pastures green. Federal biologists said the Endangered Species Act left the government no choice: The survival of two imperiled species of fish was at stake.
Law and science seemed to be on the side of the fish. Then the vice president stepped in. First Cheney looked for a way around the law, aides said. Next he set in motion a process to challenge the science protecting the fish, according to a former Oregon congressman who lobbied for the farmers.
Because of Cheney’s intervention, the government reversed itself and let the water flow in time to save the 2002 growing season, declaring that there was no threat to the fish. What followed was the largest fish kill the West had ever seen, with tens of thousands of salmon rotting on the banks of the Klamath River.
Characteristically, Cheney left no tracks. The Klamath case is one of many in which the vice president took on a decisive role to undercut long-standing environmental regulations for the benefit of business…
"When the history is written, it will be said this is a safer country and more hopeful world because George Bush was president," Cheney said. His remarks did not cover any new ground. He plugged Oklahoma’s Republican congressional delegation and presumptive GOP presidential nominee John McCain, advocated more oil wells and refineries as the solution to rising gasoline prices and predicted dire economic consequences if current temporary tax cuts and incentives are not made permanent.
The biggest share of his time, however, was spent on Iraq, Afghanistan and terrorism. "Our strategy is the right strategy," Cheney said. "The only way we can lose is to quit." "To leave the area now would invite a situation similar to the one in Afghanistan after the Soviet Union’s withdrawal in the 1980s," he said.
"We were engaged in that country, lending support to the mujahadeen against Soviet forces," he said. "Afterwards, everybody walked away and forgot about Afghanistan. What followed was a civil war and the emergence of the Taliban. In 1996, Osama Bin Laden was invited into Afghanistan. He trained thousands of terrorists, some of whom were part of the attacks here on the United States." Cheney said leaving the region now would show America "doesn’t have the stomach for a fight." "If we were to withdraw from Iraq, our friends would hear that message and so would our potential adversaries," he said.
Cheney called the Democratic Congress "irresponsible" for allowing domestic surveillance authorization to lapse. Congress actually passed the authorization but President Bush vetoed the bill because it did not include the liability protection for telecommunications companies that the administration wanted. Addressing energy and rising fuel prices, Cheney blamed Democrats for blocking domestic oil and gas production, including exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
It is interesting how these craven cowards are always the ones who get us into voluntary wars. Lyndon Johnson was terrified of being thought a coward, and as a result sent America into Vietnam. And then, a little less than forty years later, another pair of cowards…